Time enough to rot | Dylan Thomas

[wind-hover.livejournal.com]

Time enough to rot;
Toss overhead
Your golden ball of blood;
Breathe against air,
Puffing the light's flame to and fro,
Not drawing in your suction's kiss.
Your mouth's fine dust
Will find such love against the grain,
And break through dark;
It's acrid in the streets;
A paper witch upon her sulphured broom
Flies from the gutter.
The still go hard,
The moving fructify;
The walker's apple's black as sin;
The waters of his mind draw in.

Then swim your head,
For you've got a sea to lie.

 

(One of his lesser-known poems I really like, but haven't been able to fully understand.)

Against Writing about Children, Erin Belieu

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Against Writing about Children
Erin Belieu

When I think of the many people
who privately despise children,
I can't say I'm completely shocked,

having been one. I was not
exceptional, uncomfortable as that is
to admit, and most children are not

exceptional. The particulars of
cruelty, sizes Large and X-Large,
memory gnawing it like

a fat dog, are ordinary: Mean Miss
Smigelsky from the sixth grade;
the orthodontist who

slapped you for crying out. Children
frighten us, other people's and
our own. They reflect

the virused figures in which failure
began. We feel accosted by their
vulnerable natures. Each child turns

into a problematic ocean, a mirrored
body growing denser and more
difficult to navigate until

sunlight merely bounces
off the surface. They become impossible
to sound. Like us, but even weaker.

Terrance Hayes; Cocktails with Orpheus

[mariashes.livejournal.com]

After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stood
naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned
a gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now—Orpheus says she did

not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she found
a good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and
a house, she was a decent wife. I know descent lives in the word

decent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands
me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind
I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound

as touch permits, saying don't forget me when I become the liquid
out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made.

I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold
of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what's left of the deed.

Recovery | Sharon Preiss

[exceptindreams.livejournal.com]

“Recovery”
Sharon Preiss

You must convince yourself, over and
over, it is all for the best, it is better
than the life you had before, before you got
hit by the brick of your predicament:
not being able to live with or without
the booze. You will be asked to give up
your friend, the bottle that has been with you
through every victory and defeat, every major
or small event of your life. Every
lover, party, baseball game or
innocent backyard toss of the frisbee.
It will be like someone pulling your
guts out. It will be like being crushed
into a ball and thrown into the trash.
It will be like dying. You will get through it.
You will see things about yourself
you never imagined. You will see yourself
for the drunk you were, how you never
missed a chance for the buzz. You will be
shocked because never in your wildest dreams
did you expect to grow-up a drunk. Never in your
thousands of cocktails did you think you were anything
but civilized. You will see through all these things
as clear as ice melting. You will never be able
to fool yourself again.
( Read more... )

 

Agha Shahid Ali, 'Beyond the Ash Rains'

[lyryk.livejournal.com]

On the occasion of Agha Shahid Ali's death anniversary today, I thought I'd share one of my favourite poems by him.

Beyond the Ash Rains


'What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh


When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be... Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.